Ancestors of the world's formally attired flightless birds may have booked it from the South Pole around 12 million years ago to escape a cold spell.

The find, which researchers report November 12 in Biology Letters, clarifies penguins’ history. Previously, scientists had pegged the origin of penguins to somewhere between 10 million and 50 million years ago, with members of the bird family scattering between Antarctica and the tropics sometime later.